Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

fucking fantastic post

Dahkoht_sl said:

Honestly , it's a personal thing to me that this irritates me on Brads' part. I don't really care what his reasons are , be it working 24/7 on other funding , the new site , whatever. He has abandoned the current Kickstarter for over a week now.

I again see Ben and Sal and whoever posting ,but zero Brad for a week , on the Kickstarter asking for a million or so dollars.

If he can't focus for 8 weeks on trying this correctly and dedicating himself the the KS , just for 8 weeks , combined with his history (that I was willing to give him another chance on ), why the fuck should anyone think the can pull off 36 months of focus ?

Brad HAS abandoned the KS , doesn't matter what he's been doing behind the scenes , the actual kickstarter he has abandoned because being there selling it is what a KS is about.

Ask Mark Jacobs how many hours went by without him posting , much less a fucking week.

It's just piling on now ,because I'm disappointed , but from what I see , Brad hasn't learned any lesson from Vanguard.

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I wont go so far to say he hasn't learned anything from Vanguard but I do agree with your overall point that it's very disappointing to see Brad not as involved on the kickstarter page as he should be. If they continue with the image that they have totally given up on the kickstarter only halfway in I'll be much less likely to give them the $855 I have pledged on kickstarter directly to them on their private site. I want this project to succeed very much but as you said this past month has been entirely disappointing, not because the kickstarter might not fund, but because the team doesn't seem to be putting as much effort in as they should be.

Arden_sl said:

Yeah, we definitely are not going to agree here. Difficulty as I defined it is absolutely old school. One of the problems/failings with modern mmos is that the have failed to challenge players enough. There are many examples of this, but death penalty/corpse loss is a really, really clear one.

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You're not using the word "difficult" correctly though. There was nothing difficult about EQ. It was all tedious, time consuming horse shit. It was a threshold for certain, but it wasn't difficult. Raiding in EQ was more about getting all of your people coordinated then it was the ACTUAL encounter. Clerics sit here, ranged here, put your mod rods here, tanks click your bash here, etc. At the very tail end of GoD/OoW you can see where they started going more towards a raiding atmosphere that made individual people responsible for their own safety, but it did not reach WoW's depth in that.

Death penalties and corpse loss is an "artificial difficulty". It's there to slow you down, to encourage you to group with others or rely on others, and to prevent you from doing whatever the fuck you want without being prepared for it.

The concepts of EQ, like penalties and corpse runs ARE old school, but they're not difficult. We've had several discussions in this thread and others about that line that needs to be toed between being "difficult" and "annoying and frustrating" and all of EQ's were of the latter variety. There are a few exceptions; hard mode LDoNs could be fucking brutal. I developed a reputation on my server as one of like, 3 fucking enchanters people would even take on the hard modes because I could do my job. There was one specific map in Rujarkian hills that had a 4 way intersection; The entrance was south, then it branched off in the other directions. Pulling anything meant you were getting about 8+ mobs in the best case scenario. Nothing else in that dungeon came close to that fucking entrance, but it was fairly brutal. LDoNs are what heroics in WoW should still be. (Though I think for the most part they very much were this, at least in TBC)

Anyways, it wasn't difficult. Most of the guys here who say such things would get their shit kicked in on regular mode garrosh in wow, let alone heroic.'

Edit: Also, while I agree with most of Lithose's post, saying there were "other MMOs" is somewhat uh...maybe giving those other games too much credit. Games like UO were the most literal definition of the term "mmo"; that being a game with lots of people online. EQ quite literally redefined the phrase - there's someone on these boards who has a sig that says, "EQ wasn't a game, it was a world" or something to that effect. And that is very true.

So while yes, there were other MMOs, it was still very much a lack of choice, and that was why EQ worked. UO and EQ were night and day in terms of what they were like. Had we had more games like EQ that got rid of some of the more frustrating aspects but still maintained a lot of what made it great (Risk vs. Reward, social aspects etc) EQ might not have done as well as it did. WoW SOMEWHAT proved this to be a true statement, though you can't take it at face value as EQ had changed, was old, and loads of people had gotten bored with it as it was.

That's not to say EQ wasn't an amazing game. It definitely was, but it wasn't all sunshine and daisies. That game had a lot of asinine things in it, but it had a literal world that you lived in, played in, fought in, worked in etc that you could deal with the annoyances. The fact that a lot of people on this board ONLY remember the good things and tune out all the things that frustrated the fuck out of them while they played is evidence towards that theory.

Pantheon however, is not going to be the game that realizes all of our hopes for the next MMO.

Who's trolling with the 10k tier again

Boozecube_sl said:

I am sure he has learned some lessons, but they don't appear to be the right ones. You know he could of just been open and direct from the start and people, myself included would be a lot less critical of mistakes. You are posting often on the kickstarter about how great everything is and how the game will get made, I don't know if you are privy to information as you often as speaking on behalf of this team. Even so it would be more meaningful coming from Brad directly.

Again the reason I get admittedly upset over this project isn't because of professional blunders. Had they screwed up on design, or coding, mismanaged funds, or any other plethora of things that could arise during the development of a game as ambitious as this it could be easily understood.

But they are screwing up common sense things that can be related to any business not just video games, I would venture to say most people here would be embarrassed if they put up that kickstarter. We suggested taking it down prior to all the interviews, prior to the press, the reason we did so wasn't to be jerks, we really wanted this group to have a chance to fund the game. Because we knew that they could do better if they tried, now they have all but abandoned the kickstarter, maybe they haven't abandoned the project but they have abandoned the kickstarter. So they can test out a new way to milk the fanbase?

Sure I might be a broken record about it but it just is so disappointing, because the idea was something really great that we could all get behind, but to see it squandered away is just sad.

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I actually agree with pretty much everything you said here; I would love it if Brad was far more active on the kickstarter page and was running this whole thing better from the beginning. I'm not negative on the kickstarter comments page simply because I realize that it's not the place to be overly negative; my PMs and emails to the team however are for more critical(though still professionally worded). I want this game to be made and this thing to fund badly. I actually don't know if the game will ever be made but I am sure they have the intention of making it.

Also with the use of the Unity engine and everything I have read and seen about it I'm also sure they could develop a full game for relatively little cost. One lesson that Brad did seem to learn from Vanguard is not to make the game world too big; the fact that they are focusing on fleshing out just one continent and relatively few races for launch is a good sign that they want to eventually release a small but quality game that they can build upon later. Will the game ever be completed? Who knows? I'm not entirely without doubt that this game will ever be completed but I am willing to risk a little bit of money to at least give it a fighting chance.

LadyVex_sl said:

You're not using the word "difficult" correctly though.

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(Just to start; yes WoW was harder than EQ in terms of twitch difficulty. WoW raids were a ton harder to execute at the individual level, by leaps and bounds.)

I'm not so sure you are, either. You're attempting to define all difficulty as tactical, individualistic difficulty. Essentially the only difficulty that fits in your paradigm is very simple, cause and effect twitch difficulty. Anything larger, such as strategic difficulty, which often has more abstracted risks? You define as "tedium" or "artificial" and that's pretty preposterous on it's face. Sit down and play a game of chess with someone ranked highly; and then come back here and try to explain why you lost in such an "easy" game that used "artificial" difficulty like planning and risk assessment and didn't have much short term reactionary difficulty in it. (In other words, "artificial" difficulty can segregate players as much as "twitch" difficulty can--so by metric do you quantify difficulty if not based on the ability to learn and avoid it?)

Tedium, in games, is suffering boredom from something thatcan'tbe avoided, it's not really tedious of the penalty can be diminished or avoided completely. If deaths JUST happened in EQ, and you had no way to avoid paying the penalty?THATis tedium, because it's essentially just bilking you time with no way to reduce the penalty cost--there is no player involvement in obtaining a superior outcome. The input and outcome in that case would be boring, and rightfully called tedium. Now, you could be saying it's "tedious" to interrupt the action--but that has two problems, first, it doesn't account for all the "strategic" (Preparation) methods you could avoid long down times with (You say it's Artificial, but really it just means it's "strategic" difficulty), and it assumes the "down time" is some universal "play stop" but in reality the amount of risk this downtime caused was pretty organic. CRs in Guk were less risky than CR's in lower Seb, for example and CR's in high traffic areas were less risky than lower trafficed ones (But you could usually farm loot easier in lower traffic ones--all kinds of trade offs).

Why is that important? Well because scaling "losses" provide discreet choices for player risk and lets you scale reward with that risk in mind. If I want to place the sword of doom on a mob, and I want it to be rare; then if my game only has a pass/fail binary system in place, I have to make that mob a bad ass, because the only challenge is getting to him and killing him. If, however, that mob could skull fuck your corpse and force you to lose a level or the trash going to him could do that? Well then, I could make him easier and I'm willing to bet people would still avoid him and his "lair" unless they can REALLY assure their victory.

That's a pretty damn obtuse example...but you see how NOT constricting yourself to "anything to distracts from the action is TEDIUM! TEDIUM I TELL YOU!" gives you tons of ways to offer your players strategic choices in how they want to assess risk? Assessing risk and consequence in a game is FUN for a lot of us. Not everyone is into the "power" fantasy of games: where the objective is to mow through your enemies and overcome them by beating them in a specific and defined way (Just executing that one way well). Some of us like to approach games like stealth fantasies provide; where the core objective is actually about minimizing consequence. But you do need to HAVE varying consequences in your game to create those levels of risk and strategic choice.

EQ's "tedium", insomecases--provided that. It wasn't "artificial" difficulty, it was just a TYPE of difficulty you didn't enjoy, and that's fair. But some of us do--some of us prefer our Xcom to be strategic andpunishingfor bad strategies. (Which X-com did well, if you passed a mission but two guys were wounded? It could actuall be a tactical victory but a strategic set back--there were layered risks in everything.) It's fun to make strategic choices and weigh consequences beyond a "pass, fail" binary. And as much as you dub it an "artificial" difficulty--it does accomplish the same dynamic of creating graded achievements within the population over time, it just does it through a different method. And that method might appeal to gamers who enjoyed the concept of choice, consequence and strategy more than the regurgitation of APM's in a rigid sequence. (Many of us find THAT to be what's "tedious" in modern MMO's--playing Azeroth Rock Band with "Kill Garrosh" as the song 10 people need to play at 98% completion. Because there is literally no strategic way to get around that memorization/regurgitation except breaking your immersion and swapping to "the derp mode". )

But long a short? Anything that costs time is not blanket "tedium", that's a pretty silly way to look at things. There were deeper issues at play there, and some of them EQ just got stupid lucky revealing (Like again, how CR's had a organic risk vs reward to them since the risk changed depending on the setting and classes available--now I don't think CR's are a great mechanic themselves BUT that hidden nugget of "difficulty"? That's something that is great.)

Edit: Edit: Oh and btw, I retired before Garrosh, but up until early Cata? I was a raid leader for a guild who did heroics; we were a server first guild in Vanilla and TBC. Also, I was able to get Glad a few times here and there throughout TBC and LK with 3 man teams; so, no, I'm not just some baddy pining for the days of old. I'm simply saying there were deeper revelations in EQ beyond what you just saw on the surface. On the surface? Yes CR's were a poor mechanic, however, the effect of them? That was a good thing, for example.

I enjoy reading some of these posts. Very good.

I've been thinking about sites like wowhead and zam lately and how they've removed lots of the difficulty from MMOs. EQ was hard at the beginning because there was no information. Soon after EQ launched we got maps and all on the web. I don't have to use these cheat sheet kind of sites but if I get stuck on something, instead of exploring and asking questions, I google it.

And then there are youtube videos that show you how to beat bosses.

Part of the social element was that when you got stuck on something you might ask a guildy or general chat. Now people tell you to google it.

I'm not sure how a developer can protect their games from these cheat sheet type sites but a lot of the difficulty came from not knowing. You don't have to use them but I think most of us do.

Dumar_sl said:

You could zone into Unrest and meet a train at the zoneline, be more or less instagibbed. Then if you were melee, you'd have to run all the way from BB or Kelethin to get your corpse. And you lost exp. And you were cursing along the way. This was at level 18.

In WoW, you never cared that you were instagibbed because nothing was ever lost. You could die at level 8, 18, 20, 60, and it never matted. You never got trained either. And you never lost exp. So nothing every really mattered.

That's oldschool difficulty.

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I think that aspect was covered under 'consequences' in their discussion - I guess you could call it difficulty but your point was adressed.

Dahkoht_sl said:

Again ,if it adds to your tier access total it's like a payment plan that gets more to a 500.00 tier. = smart move on Brad and Co's part.

But if it's not , that means they are asking someone who wants in on the inner circle forums the entire time to pony up 500 for just the forums and a CE copy of the game. You'd still have to buy whatever tier you want on top of that to get other perks or add-ons. = Milking the true believers to silly levels.

I'm very curious which way they are going with this choice.

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Judging from the way this whole campaign has been going their initial plan was that you simply pay the 15 for the forum, and after reading suggestions like yours they go "wow great idea, lets do that and look less like cash-grabs / get more subs".

At least SoE actually had a product to give people when they charged $50+ for Alpha access. Charging a subscription for access to forums for a game that doesn't even have a solid design doc under it yet takes some fucking brass balls.

Aeiouy_sl said:

Pvp is way more popular in mmogs than it ever was in EQ. I never thought I was awesome because I could corpse camp, zone line camp or Zerg. Didn't ever find it to be challenging nor compelling. The percentage of encounters that were a challenge was minuscule.

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Are there any successful PVP MMOs left besides EVE?

The thing is that what is popular isnt really MMO PvP. It's mini-game PvP. Matched teams based on ranking, what's MMO about that? Where is the difference between 3v3 SC2 game, LoL and WoW Arena matches? The only difference I see is the gear grind. I dont mind either version of PvP (I enjoy both EVE and LoL) but I find most people dont bother with the distinction. I believe what passes for MMO PvP these days would be even more successful without the MMO part - actually it already IS more successful with LoL/DotA2. maybe add a small gear grind to fuel that addiction on the side, I believe DotA2 does something like that (never bothered with it)?

Imo actual MMO PvP needs as little guidance and extra rules as possible and take place in the actual world. Instance it away and it simply isnt MMO pvp any longer, its a sports match mini-game. Wait until they release the SC MMO and you can queue for actual SC2 matches from within the client.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here but both Brad and Salim came out pretty strongly against the idea of dynamic content in Pantheon in the recent Project 1999 video on YouTube.

I believe dynamic content is the future of the MMORPG genre as it is far less costly to create and provides far more enjoyment for the players than the current stale scripted theme-park model.

Ipublished an article about thistoday.

Wolfshead_sl said:

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned here but both Brad and Salim came out pretty strongly against the idea of dynamic content in Pantheon in the recent Project 1999 video on YouTube.

I believe dynamic content is the future of the MMORPG genre as it is far less costly to create and provides far more enjoyment for the players than the current stale scripted theme-park model.

Ipublished an article about thistoday.

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While I don't have time to comment in detail now, and I only skimmed your blog post, I disagree that fully dynamic content is the answer to content construction. This is an interesting discussion, so I will read your post in detail later today, and comment properly on it.

Lithose_sl said:

(Just to start; yes WoW was harder than EQ in terms of twitch difficulty. WoW raids were a ton harder to execute at the individual level, by leaps and bounds.)

I'm not so sure you are, either. You're attempting to define all difficulty as tactical, individualistic difficulty. Essentially the only difficulty that fits in your paradigm is very simple, cause and effect twitch difficulty. Anything larger, such as strategic difficulty, which often has more abstracted risks? You define as "tedium" or "artificial" and that's pretty preposterous on it's face. Sit down and play a game of chess with someone ranked highly; and then come back here and try to explain why you lost in such an "easy" game that used "artificial" difficulty like planning and risk assessment and didn't have much short term reactionary difficulty in it. (In other words, "artificial" difficulty can segregate players as much as "twitch" difficulty can--so by metric do you quantify difficulty if not based on the ability to learn and avoid it?)

Tedium, in games, is suffering boredom from something thatcan'tbe avoided, it's not really tedious of the penalty can be diminished or avoided completely. If deaths JUST happened in EQ, and you had no way to avoid paying the penalty?THATis tedium, because it's essentially just bilking you time with no way to reduce the penalty cost--there is no player involvement in obtaining a superior outcome. The input and outcome in that case would be boring, and rightfully called tedium. Now, you could be saying it's "tedious" to interrupt the action--but that has two problems, first, it doesn't account for all the "strategic" (Preparation) methods you could avoid long down times with (You say it's Artificial, but really it just means it's "strategic" difficulty), and it assumes the "down time" is some universal "play stop" but in reality the amount of risk this downtime caused was pretty organic. CRs in Guk were less risky than CR's in lower Seb, for example and CR's in high traffic areas were less risky than lower trafficed ones (But you could usually farm loot easier in lower traffic ones--all kinds of trade offs).

Why is that important? Well because scaling "losses" provide discreet choices for player risk and lets you scale reward with that risk in mind. If I want to place the sword of doom on a mob, and I want it to be rare; then if my game only has a pass/fail binary system in place, I have to make that mob a bad ass, because the only challenge is getting to him and killing him. If, however, that mob could skull fuck your corpse and force you to lose a level? Well then, I could make him easier and I'm willing to bet people would still avoid him unless they can REALLY assure their victory.

That's a pretty damn obtuse example...but you see how NOT constricting yourself to "anything to distracts from the action is TEDIUM! TEDIUM I TELL YOU!" gives you tons of ways to offer your players strategic choices in how they want to assess risk? Assessing risk and consequence in a game is FUN for a lot of us. Not everyone is into the "power" fantasy of games: where the objective is to mow through your enemies and overcome them by beating them in a specific and defined way (Just executing that one way well). Some of us like to approach games like stealth fantasies provide; where the core objective is actually about minimizing consequence. But you do need to HAVE varying consequences in your game to create those levels of risk and strategic choice.

EQ's "tedium", insomecases--provided that. It wasn't "artificial" difficulty, it was just a TYPE of difficulty you didn't enjoy, and that's fair. But some of us do--some of us prefer our Xcom to be strategic andpunishingfor bad strategies. (Which X-com did well, if you passed a mission but two guys were wounded? It could actuall be a tactical victory but a strategic set back--there were layered risks in everything.) It's fun to make strategic choices and weigh consequences beyond a "pass, fail" binary. And that's the main double edge in this accessibility crusade: Making some accessible often eliminatesconsequence, it eliminates that longer term, abstract risk because it assumes the player can't account for it.

But long a short? Anything that costs time is not blanket "tedium", that's a pretty silly way to look at things. There were deeper issues at play there, and some of them EQ just got stupid lucky revealing (Like again, how CR's had a organic risk vs reward to them since the risk changed depending on the setting and classes available--now I don't think CR's are a great mechanic themselves BUT that hidden nugget of "difficulty"? That's something that is great.)

Edit: Edit: Oh and btw, I retired before Garrosh, but up until early cata I raid lead everything on heroic. And I was able to get Glad a few times here and there throughout TBC and LK

so, no, I'm not just some baddy pining for the days of old. I'm simply saying there were deeper things than what you think about on the surface with EQ. There WERE reasons why it had a huge population compared to say, Asherons Call; now, I doubt ANY of them were intentional, but under all those mistakes, there was some cleverness that hasn't really been explored since.

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Great post, it pretty much sums up why I am a fan of going back to slower combat and all it entails. This 'dodge the red circle' focus of wow and most post wow - mmo's is really what's become 'tedious' to me.

Lithose_sl said:

(Just to start; yes WoW was harder than EQ in terms of twitch difficulty. WoW raids were a ton harder to execute at the individual level, by leaps and bounds.)

I'm not so sure you are, either. You're attempting to define all difficulty as tactical, individualistic difficulty. Essentially the only difficulty that fits in your paradigm is very simple, cause and effect twitch difficulty. Anything larger, such as strategic difficulty, which often has more abstracted risks? You define as "tedium" or "artificial" and that's pretty preposterous on it's face. Sit down and play a game of chess with someone ranked highly; and then come back here and try to explain why you lost in such an "easy" game that used "artificial" difficulty like planning and risk assessment and didn't have much short term reactionary difficulty in it. (In other words, "artificial" difficulty can segregate players as much as "twitch" difficulty can--so by metric do you quantify difficulty if not based on the ability to learn and avoid it?)

Tedium, in games, is suffering boredom from something thatcan'tbe avoided, it's not really tedious of the penalty can be diminished or avoided completely. If deaths JUST happened in EQ, and you had no way to avoid paying the penalty?THATis tedium, because it's essentially just bilking you time with no way to reduce the penalty cost--there is no player involvement in obtaining a superior outcome. The input and outcome in that case would be boring, and rightfully called tedium. Now, you could be saying it's "tedious" to interrupt the action--but that has two problems, first, it doesn't account for all the "strategic" (Preparation) methods you could avoid long down times with (You say it's Artificial, but really it just means it's "strategic" difficulty), and it assumes the "down time" is some universal "play stop" but in reality the amount of risk this downtime caused was pretty organic. CRs in Guk were less risky than CR's in lower Seb, for example and CR's in high traffic areas were less risky than lower trafficed ones (But you could usually farm loot easier in lower traffic ones--all kinds of trade offs).

Why is that important? Well because scaling "losses" provide discreet choices for player risk and lets you scale reward with that risk in mind. If I want to place the sword of doom on a mob, and I want it to be rare; then if my game only has a pass/fail binary system in place, I have to make that mob a bad ass, because the only challenge is getting to him and killing him. If, however, that mob could skull fuck your corpse and force you to lose a level? Well then, I could make him easier and I'm willing to bet people would still avoid him unless they can REALLY assure their victory.

That's a pretty damn obtuse example...but you see how NOT constricting yourself to "anything to distracts from the action is TEDIUM! TEDIUM I TELL YOU!" gives you tons of ways to offer your players strategic choices in how they want to assess risk? Assessing risk and consequence in a game is FUN for a lot of us. Not everyone is into the "power" fantasy of games: where the objective is to mow through your enemies and overcome them by beating them in a specific and defined way (Just executing that one way well). Some of us like to approach games like stealth fantasies provide; where the core objective is actually about minimizing consequence. But you do need to HAVE varying consequences in your game to create those levels of risk and strategic choice.

EQ's "tedium", insomecases--provided that. It wasn't "artificial" difficulty, it was just a TYPE of difficulty you didn't enjoy, and that's fair. But some of us do--some of us prefer our Xcom to be strategic andpunishingfor bad strategies. (Which X-com did well, if you passed a mission but two guys were wounded? It could actuall be a tactical victory but a strategic set back--there were layered risks in everything.) It's fun to make strategic choices and weigh consequences beyond a "pass, fail" binary. And that's the main double edge in this accessibility crusade: Making some accessible often eliminatesconsequence, it eliminates that longer term, abstract risk because it assumes the player can't account for it.

But long a short? Anything that costs time is not blanket "tedium", that's a pretty silly way to look at things. There were deeper issues at play there, and some of them EQ just got stupid lucky revealing (Like again, how CR's had a organic risk vs reward to them since the risk changed depending on the setting and classes available--now I don't think CR's are a great mechanic themselves BUT that hidden nugget of "difficulty"? That's something that is great.)

Edit: Edit: Oh and btw, I retired before Garrosh, but up until early cata I raid lead everything on heroic. And I was able to get Glad a few times here and there throughout TBC and LK

so, no, I'm not just some baddy pining for the days of old. I'm simply saying there were deeper things than what you think about on the surface with EQ. There WERE reasons why it had a huge population compared to say, Asherons Call; now, I doubt ANY of them were intentional, but under all those mistakes, there was some cleverness that hasn't really been explored since.

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Great post, it pretty much sums up why I am a fan of going back to slower combat and all it entails. This 'dodge the red circle' focus of wow and most post wow - mmo's is really what's become 'tedious' to me.

Dumar_sl said:

I... just want to play EverQuest again...

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Join Project 1999. It's really good.

Its really not, troy you worry me.....

Troy_Costisick_sl said:

Join Project 1999. It's really good.

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The wife and I started characters last night. Not sure if I have the energy to do this for about the dozenth time but we will see haha.

EQ had 3 things that really defined the type of game it was. None of which was difficulty.

Tedium - Corpse runs were tedious. Grinding mobs is the very definition of tedium as all your doing is sitting in one place killing the same mob over and over again, usually just so you can watch that blue experience bar move. If you ran across Kithicor as a lowbie and got killed and had a body stuck in a high lvl area, that wasn't difficulty that was being dumb for trying to run through a high level area. After that smart people just hugged zone walls.

Consequence - On the same token, if you did run through a high area and got killed, there was a consequence to that. You didn't just respawn with you body and gear. You just got taught the hard way that you can't run around the world like your Superman, because your not. Of course most of this only applied through the leveling process, once you were max level there weren't a ton of zones that were dangerous anymore.

Dependability - Using the same example, if you died in a high level area you were then faced with a couple of choices. Either run back yourself and risk not dying again while trying to get your body (in some cases this was impossible) or get a high level friend or player to get your body for you. You were dependent on other players for many things (buffs, corpse recovery, grouping, etc) and no other game has replicated this.

Now I think it's certainly possible to create a game that has these elements (less tedium though) that is fun. Is that kind of game going to be embraced by all, even if it included such modern tools such as LFG or dungeon finder to reduce some of the tedium without sacrificing the consequence and dependability aspects? Hard to say, like others have said and what I think puts this team (or any that trying to make a game like this) at a disadvantage is some players only want EQ reskinned where as other want an EQ like game with modern elements (sort of a cross between EQ and vanilla WoW). I think it's a mistake that Brad won't even reference WoW in any capacity in fear he's going to piss off the majority of the neckbeards but I think his game with be better for it if he designs with both games in mind.